School of Meditation Weekly Teachings

If we just watch our thoughts for a while, we realise quite soon that all of them are linked to the past or to the future. They whirl around our concerns about what has happened, in the form of memories, both good and bad, or about what might happen, our fears, hopes, desires and plans.

The essence of meditation is stillness and silence. Silence is both external and internal. External silence is hard to find in our world today. We are bombarded by trivia and distraction through the media.

Quotes about the Mantra in the Eastern and Western Tradition of Christianity

“The mind should unceasingly cling to the mantra until strengthened by continual use of it, it casts off and rejects the rich and ample matter of all kinds of thought and restricts itself to the poverty of the single verse.

"I want now to address a particular question that we all encounter. It is the question of distractions. What should you do when you begin to meditate and distracting thoughts come into your mind? The advice that the tradition has to give us is to ignore the distractions and to say your word and to keep on saying your word.

Last week we talked about what may happen to us on our journey of meditation. We begin with enthusiasm, our commitment to the daily practice grows, but in time we inevitably meet with the ‘demon of acedia’. We start feeling bored and restless; we feel as if we enter the desert.

The journey of meditation is in John Main’s words essentially “a pilgrimage to our own heart”, the most sacred place, where Christ dwells. Meditation is discovering “the life of the Spirit of Jesus within our human heart.”

In Christianity praying by repeating a set phrase or phrases has been a very well -established practice throughout the ages, just think of the ‘Our Father’, the ‘Hail Mary’, ‘Glory be’, and the ‘Jesus Prayer’ in the Orthodox tradition.

In our mind we often restrict the aim and purpose of meditation to a way of relaxing our surface self and dealing with our stressful lives. The focussed attention on our prayer word, our mantra does indeed do exactly that. And that is good too!

This is an important question any meditator or group leader will be asked. Often we start feeling so relaxed after saying the mantra for a while, that the mantra may seem an interruption in the peace and quiet we are experiencing.